Oracle and Open Source

Choice, Flexibility, and Lower Cost with Oracle and Open Source

Oracle is committed to offering choice, flexibility, and lower cost of computing for end users. By investing significant resources in developing, testing, optimizing, and supporting open source technologies such as MySQL, GlassFish, Java, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, and Xen, Oracle is clearly embracing and offering leading open source solutions as a viable choice for development and deployment.

We cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. Today, many customers are using Oracle together with open source technologies in mission-critical environments and are reaping the benefits of lower costs, easier manageability, higher availability, and reliability along with performance and scalability advantages.

Key Open Source Initiatives

Oracle Berkeley DB is a family of open source, embeddable databases that allows developers to incorporate within their applications a fast, scalable, transactional database engine with industrial grade reliability and availability. It is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million.

As a strategic developer and member of the Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors, Oracle contributes to three Eclipse projects: Dali JPA Tools, JavaServer Faces (JSF), and BPEL. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse provides tools that make it easier for Eclipse users to develop applications utilizing specific Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies and Oracle Database.

A lightweight, flexible, and open source application server, Glassfish is the first compatible implementation of the Java EE 6 platform specification. To learn about Java EE 7 features, go to the Java EE Home page.

Oracle leads the Hudson Project, a continuous integration (CI) tool written in Java that runs in a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat or the GlassFish application server. It supports SCM tools including CVS, Subversion, Git, and Clearcase and can execute Apache Ant and Apache Maven based projects, as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands.

Java.net is a large community of Java developers and open source projects. Anyone interested in Java and related JVM technologies is welcome to join! Participate in communities, blogs, technical articles, and more.

The Jersey RESTful Web Services framework is an open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation.

Oracle has supported and invested in Linux since 1998, when we introduced the first ever commercial database supporting Linux. In 2006, we launched the Oracle Linux distribution and support program. Oracle is an active member of the Linux community through code contributions, testing programs, and deployment best practices for customers. In fact, Oracle has been a founding platinum member of The Linux Foundation since its inception in 2007. Oracle’s employs several kernel developers who work directly with the Linux community and contribute code and testing. Oracle’s key Linux contributions highlight Oracle's technical leadership and dedication to the worldwide success of Linux for organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Metro is a high-performance, extensible, easy-to-use, web service stack that allows you to quickly and easily develop a range of web services, from a simple ‘hello world’ service to reliable, secured, and transacted web services involving .NET services. While the Metro web service stack is a part of GlassFish community, it is also heavily used outside of GlassFish.

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software for web, cloud and mobile applications, with more than 100 million copies of its software downloaded and distributed throughout its history. Oracle continues to drive MySQL innovation with a focus on growing both the community engagement as well as the user base.

NetBeans offers a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for software developers, along with all the tools to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with Java, C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby. The NetBeans IDE is the de facto reference IDE for the Java Platform, and it is committed to being the first to provide first-class comprehensive support for the latest versions of the Java specifications. NetBeans Platform is the world's only modular Swing application framework.

OpenJDK is the place to collaborate on an open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition, and related projects. It is licensed as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2, with the Classpath Exception. To learn about Java SE features, go to the Java SE page.

Oracle contributes heavily to feature development of Xen mainline software and is a member of the Xen Advisory Board. Oracle VM, Oracle’s next-generation server virtualization software, includes the Xen hypervisor.